Keeping people safe and reducing crime. In simplistic terms, that’s what policing is all about. And the increasing availability of digital solutions designed for the blue light community is helping officers and organisations ‘work smarter’, in terms of improved response time and reduced bureaucracy which ultimately means better outcomes for everyone.

On the Motorola Solutions stand at B-APCO, visitors were able to experience some of the smart solutions that are making digital transformation possible today and also take a ‘sneak peek’ into the future of incident command.

Today, as we collect more and more data from multiple sources, the challenge for public safety is how to turn that mass of data into actionable intelligence available when needed. To allow this the next generation of control room solutions are cloud hosted offering no limits data-storage and easy sharing of multiple streams of data. With platforms and solutions such as CommandCentraland WAVE CRS, operators and analysts can have immediate access to this information so that they can drive the right response at the right time. From the control room to the front line, everyone is connected in real time and has access to the information they need.

And on the frontline, Prontospeeds up end-to-end business processes, delivering faster responses to the officer on the scene, and reducing bureaucracy. Pronto Biometrics finger print identification is the latest use for this flexible digital application. With direct access to police and immigration databases, officers needing to check fingerprints can do this in real time on the street from a smartphone twinned with an affordable finger print scanner. With no need to return to a police station for desktop identification and the avoidance of unnecessary detentions the operational benefits and potential cost-savings on equipment and resource are clear.

Going forward, these simplified electronic processes can give increased accessibility to data that will deliver easy to access statistics and help establish patterns of behaviour. This could in turn deliver improvements in reporting and potentially allow forces to be more responsive to demand through informed resourcing.

Finally, with a glimpse into the future, visitors to the booth were able to experience how the use of augmented reality could deliver rich situational awareness to tomorrow’s mission controllers by giving the ability to ‘see’ officers in the context of their surroundings during an incident. The Mixed Reality Incident Command concept helped visitors understand what might be possible when you can move from trying to visualise and manage an incident through voice only to having rich contextual, information about the situation in front of you.

3 - DIMETRA Express at Critical Communications Europe 2017 - Paul Wilson introduces the new DIMETRA Express - a fully integrated 'all-in-box' TETRA system that supports TETRA voice services, short data, and VOIP telephony. Paul explains how simple the system is to install - taking less than 15 minutes!

4 - Welcome to Critical Communications Europe 2017 - Tunde Williams welcomes us to Critical Communications Europe 2017. With over 1000 Public Safety and Commercial visitors expected how are we meeting their challenges? How are we future-proofing TETRA? Why is our new DIMETRA Express solution so important?

5 - Poppy Social Story: Honouring Those Who Keep Us Safe - Every day, Emergency Services personnel are using social media to inform the public and engage with the communities they serve. UK Police Twitter Award Winner, Sgt. Harry Tangye from Devon and Cornwall Police shares his top tips for building a loyal and engaged following on social media.

6 - PMRExpo 2017 stand tour - by drone - With over 4000 visitors, this year's PMRExpo was a real buzz. In case you missed it, or didn't see it all - here's a tour of our stand.

The PMRExpo Exhibition and Conference is widely recognised as being one of the biggest and most important events in the calendar for everyone involved in Professional Mobile Radio and Control Rooms. This year we are contributing to both the conference and the exhibition (stand C12.)

And in the exhibition? We know that data has the potential to create safer cities, thriving communities, and more efficient and effective operations. But the power of the data is unleashed when it’s converted into actionable intelligence, and is in the hands of those who need it, when they need it, so they can make the best informed decisions when and where it matters most. To do this, you need mobility. Mobile Intelligence harnesses data by unifying applications, networks, devices and services to transform critical operations and work processes.

We will be showing a set of solutions that are critical elements of our mobile intelligence framework. Here are some highlights:

Purpose Built Devices – a comprehensive selection of TETRA handheld and mobile radios and pagers, DMR handhelds, P25 handhelds, LTE handhelds and Body Worn Devices. These are backed up with an extensive range of accessories and applications.

Mixed Reality Demonstrations – check out these demonstrations that show how immersive experiences enhance situation awareness. The first demonstration shows an intuitive way for a Future Fire Fighter Commander to get partly immersed in an incident in a burning building using Mixed-Reality Technology. Using virtual reality and video feeds, they can monitor the situation inside and around a burning building and make better informed decisions, faster. The second demonstration shows how a remote Future Police Incident Commander can gain instant understanding of a scene, allowing them to guide and follow a SWAT team throughout a rescue exercise. It uses wearable technology, drones, broadband and artificial intelligence together, to create a 3D holographic visualisation of the incident.

Collaborating Seamlessly Over Borderless Networks – see how our WAVE™ interoperability platform, enables you to connect any device to any network and enable seamless workgroup collaboration.

Next Generation Control Room Systems – experience how we support the field with more meaningful, real-time intelligence by extracting deeper insights from integrated voice, video and data; and integrate powerful real-time communications with advanced fleet control and dispatch functionalities.

Maximise Your System And Devices Availability And Ensure Continuity – check out how our tiered levels of support help you address existing vulnerabilities, build cyber resilience, assess your risk posture, and understand how to respond and recover from intrusions.

Keep a watch out for new announcements and demos at the show too. You can find out more about these and keep up-to-date with news, videos and more during the show by visiting our dedicated event microsite – https://www.motorolasolutions.com/pmrexpo

We look forward to seeing you!

Axel Kukuk is Head of Government and Military Sales Germany at Motorola Solutions

British APCO continues to be the forum for public safety and civil contingencies communications engagement. This year we are taking a very active part in all the BAPCO events.

We recognise that the UK public safety community faces new challenges - doing more with less, managing technology transition and being able to turn abundant data into increased operational efficiency and better outcomes.

At B-APCO Autumn, drop by and see us at the exhibition on level 4 of the Newcastle United Conference and Banqueting area to see how we are addressing these challenges:

Managing Technology Transition - Faced with a fast evolving technology landscape, many public sector organisations are moving away from traditional capital expense based IT procurement, opting instead for more flexible, subscription-based models. An OPEX-based service approach allows you to shift the focus from buying technology to buying outcomes. See how, with our cloud-based WAVE™ Control Room Solution (WAVE CRS), you can simplify your control room’s ESN upgrade, stay-up-to-date and save money.

Doing More With Less - Budgetary pressures combined with increased public expectations are driving the emergency services to do more with less. With the right technology your organisation can meet these challenges. Using the Pronto digital policing solution, you can increase your visibility and presence in the community through improved efficiency and productivity. With the Si500 video speaker microphone, your fire and rescue service can use captured video to enhance learning, improve incident analysis and simplify evidential capture for fire investigations. See these solutions and more devices in action.

Harnessing Abundant Data - Today, we have access to more data than ever before. The challenge is to turn the abundant data into actionable insights that lead to better outcomes for the community. See how, with the CommandCentral platform, you can take advantage of a broad set of capabilities, from intelligence that uncovers deeper insights, to records and content management that streamlines data collection and digital evidence management.

Don’t miss us in the conference either - Yann Marston is speaking on 'Transform Data into Safety, Creating an intelligence layer on legacy systems’ at 13:55 on Wednesday 8 November.

Are you ready for the future? It has become a frequent question but it is still an important one. Even more so when you are dealing with mission critical communications.

Being prepared for whatever comes next and being ready for the unknown is really the essence of a successful mission critical organisation - be it Police, Fire and Rescue or Emergency Medical Services. Public Safety agencies need to be ready for whatever tomorrow brings. And this applies as much to their critical communications network and devices as to anything else they rely on.

We all know that the evolution to mission critical mobile broadband technology is on the horizon. For some this journey has already started. Just take a look at the ESN project in the UK and FirstNet in the USA. But we know there will challenges on this road to the future. It is not necessarily going to be a simple changeover from an LMR to an LTE network - we know that it will need to be an evolution and not a revolution.

Today most public safety organisations have an LMR network, be it TETRA or P25. These LMR networks will be around for at least another fifteen years or more - delivering mission critical voice communications. And it is conceivable that they will be around for a lot longer than that as not all organisations will fully migrate from LMR to mobile broadband. Some will run parallel voice and data networks for quite a while and some may even stick with LMR for good.

Inevitably public safety organisations will start using mobile broadband for some of their communication needs, primarily data communications. We have already seen this with police forces using commercial 3G and 4G networks for mobile data applications to improve their operational efficiency using applications like Pronto in the UK or SceneDoc in the USA. Increasingly public safety agencies are turning to MVNOs making use of commercial networks to quickly provide the coverage and capacity they need for these applications, whilst temporarily accepting the risks associated with lower resilience and cyber-security. Eventually mobile broadband networks dedicated to public safety will be deployed in some but not all places.

One thing is for sure though – there will be different network models deployed around the world – from parallel voice and data networks, and MVNOs to dedicated Public Safety LTE networks. But there are mission critical challenges yet to be met by mobile broadband technology such as Direct Mode Operation and Air-to-Ground communications as well as items like resilience, disaster recovery and security. In time technology will answer most if not all of these challenges - but this is where TETRA will have a part to play for a long time to come.

This is why we designed and built DIMETRA X Core – our new, fully scalable TETRA system - taking all the experience we have built up over the past 20 years from the 1,000 Dimetra systems we have deployed – so that mission critical networks can be ready for the future today.

Over the next few years LMR and mobile broadband networks are going to converge and operate as collaborative networks as the first step in this evolution to the mission critical mobile broadband. And this is where DIMETRA X Core comes in. With its smart interfaces and support ofIntelligent Middleware and WAVE technology it has been designed to work alongside and collaborate with an LTE network.

The march to the future also brings with it other challenges such as ever increasing cyber security threats and the growing need for cross border collaboration. Designed to be on the leading edge of mission critical communications, DIMETRA X Core has the capability for an Inter System Interface (ISI) to enable cross-border communications and an advanced set of protective, cyber-security measures.

Public Safety organisations need to be more flexible with their resources to respond to the challenges presented by unpredictable and increasingly extreme situations in our fast-changing world. Which is why DIMETRA X Core’s software defined core is designed to allow customers to quickly and easily add new features and additional capacity to their mission critical communications system as circumstances change.

Dimetra X Core allows customers to not only embrace the future potential of mission critical mobile broadband but also respond to the changes the future brings as they happen - it also maximises the value derived from their existing TETRA network so they can continue being ready for the future, today.